Clearing your recent emojis in WhatsApp Web

Ever wondered where the recent emojis in WhatsApp Web are stored? As I was talking to my close ones today, I recently noticed something really annoying. I had to use a poop emoji to someone for a crazy reason and I was doing it using WhatsApp Web. It really annoyed me every time I opened it and thought I should be getting rid of that shit sooner!

Being a front-end architect, I started exploring where this is getting saved. I was thinking it would be just cookies, but it wasn’t the case here. When I checked the Developer Tools on Chrome, I could find some entries in the Local Storage hiding in the Application tab.

I noticed something weird here. All the keys were some sort of base64 encoded. I tried decoding a few and saw these results. I am unable to include the text version of the decoded string, so I am including an image of the conversion.

Okay, I give up. When I tried pasting the contents in notepad, it crashed. Wow! So, who cares? I went through the other entries in the list and found two that caught my attention. I could see a weighted graph of all the emojis and their weights, by the usage too, and another one with the character, and the variant. This kinda looks to me like they are using some sort of relational database to store it in JSON.

What did I do? I just edited them out with empty arrays! And hard-refreshed the browser. Voila, all the recent emojis gone! Also, just to note, this worked only in WhatsApp Web and this doesn’t affect your phone’s keyboard in any way. This is kinda good as well as disappointing as I want to really clear my phone’s WhatsApp recent emojis without rooting the phone.

Let me know in the comments if you have a solution and if you found this tutorial helpful and interesting and it works too! Until next story then! 😊